Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Mazviita Chirimuuta is a philosopher at the University of Edinburgh. Today we discuss topics from her new book, The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience. She largely argues that when we try to understand something complex, like the brain, using models, and math, and analogies, for example – we should keep in mind these are all ways of simplifying and abstracting away details to give us something we actually can understand. And, when we do science, every tool we use and perspe ..read more

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. As some of you know, I recently got back into the research world, and in particular I work in Eric Yttris’ lab at Carnegie Mellon University. Eric’s lab studies the relationship between various kinds of behaviors and the neural activity in a few areas known to be involved in enacting and shaping those behaviors, namely the motor cortex and basal ganglia.  And study that, he uses tools like optogentics, neuronal recordings, and stimulations, while mice perform certain tasks, or, in my case, while they freely beha ..read more

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Peter Stratton is a research scientist at Queensland University of Technology. I was pointed toward Pete by a patreon supporter, who sent me a sort of perspective piece Pete wrote that is the main focus of our conversation, although we also talk about some of his work in particular – for example, he works with spiking neural networks, like my last guest, Dan Goodman. What Pete argues for is what he calls a sideways-in approach. So a bottom-up approach is to build things like we find them in the brain, put them togeth ..read more

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. You may know my guest as the co-founder of Neuromatch, the excellent online computational neuroscience academy, or as the creator of the Brian spiking neural network simulator, which is freely available. I know him as a spiking neural network practitioner extraordinaire. Dan Goodman runs the Neural Reckoning Group at Imperial College London, where they use spiking neural networks to figure out how biological and artificial brains reckon, or compute. All of the current AI we use to do all the impressive things we do ..read more

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Check out my free video series about what’s missing in AI and Neuroscience John Krakauer has been on the podcast multiple times (see links below). Today we discuss some topics framed around what he’s been working on and thinking about lately. Things like Whether brains actually reorganize after damage The role of brain plasticity in general The path toward and the path not toward understanding higher cognition How to fix motor problems after strokes AGI Functionalism, consciousness, and much more. Relevant links ..read more

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Check out my free video series about what’s missing in AI and Neuroscience By day, Max Bennett is an entrepreneur. He has cofounded and CEO’d multiple AI and technology companies. By many other countless hours, he has studied brain related sciences. Those long hours of research have payed off in the form of this book, A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains. Three lines of research formed the basis for how Max synthesized knowledge into the ideas in his current ..read more

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Welcome to another special panel discussion episode. I was recently invited to moderate at discussion amongst 6 people at the annual Aspirational Neuroscience meetup. Aspirational Neuroscience is a nonprofit community run by Kenneth Hayworth. Ken has been on the podcast before on episode 103. Ken helps me introduce the meetup and panel discussion for a few minutes. The goal in general was to discuss how current and developing neuroscience technologies might be used to decode a nontrivial memory from a static connectom ..read more

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Check out my free video series about what’s missing in AI and Neuroscience Laura Gradowski is a philosopher of science at the University of Pittsburgh. Pluralism is roughly the idea that there is no unified account of any scientific field, that we should be tolerant of and welcome a variety of theoretical and conceptual frameworks, and methods, and goals, when doing science. Pluralism is kind of a buzz word right now in my little neuroscience world, but it’s an old and well-trodden notion… many philosophers have been ..read more

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. I was recently invited to moderate a panel at the Annual Bernstein conference – this one was in Berlin Germany. The panel I moderated was at a satellite workshop at the conference called How can machine learning be used to generate insights and theories in neuroscience? Below are the panelists. I hope you enjoy the discussion! Program: How can machine learning be used to generate insights and theories in neuroscience? Panelists: Katrin Franke Lab website. Twitter: @kfrankelab. Ralf Haefner Haefner lab. Twitter ..read more

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Check out my free video series about what’s missing in AI and Neuroscience Kevin Mitchell is professor of genetics at Trinity College Dublin. He’s been on the podcast before, and we talked a little about his previous book, Innate – How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are. He’s back today to discuss his new book Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will. The book is written very well and guides the reader through a wide range of scientific knowledge and reasoning that undergirds Kevin’s main take home: our ..read more